Histrionic Personality Disorder (1)

By: Beth McHugh 2013

Sarah-Kate is an elementary school teacher who is larger than life.
Her bubbly personality seems ideally suited to teaching her young students
and her enthusiasm certainly bowls most people over on first meeting.

Everything is "just wonderful" and your six-year old son
is "just the most sweetest boy ever!" Sarah-Kate's speech
is seductive and irrepressible, but ultimately tiring and frustrating.
While she can be highly amusing, relating humorous incidences with her
own style of overblown drama, people soon quickly learn not to believe
everything that Sarah-Kate says.

If she is stung by an ant, it is a catastrophe. Her mother's heart
attack was "huge." She will tell you that your passion fruit
shortcake is "truly beyond professional level" and that her
boyfriend, the last in a long, long line, is "definitely the one."

In therapy, I have been told that I am the greatest therapist ever
by various sufferers of HPD; that my ability to read their situation
is "divinely uncanny." Clearly I have no celestial powers,
but this type of talk is characteristic of people with histrionic personality
disorder. It is almost like they are on stage, playing to an enthusiastic
audience at all times.

It is also very hard to pin these people down on details. Using mostly
superlatives, everything you ask them about is "huge", "fabulous",
or "truly outstanding." Conversely, bad things in their lives
are "crushing," "deeply disturbing," "terrifyingly
scary," or "I thought this was the end, that I'd drawn my
last breath."

But you can never quite get them to explain any of their thoughts and
feelings in detail. Consequently it is hard to ever get close to them,
to really know them. They have problems with developing close, meaningful
relationships with either gender because of this over dramatized behavior
pattern that pervades all aspects of their lives.

There are also problems in employment as co-workers cannot rely on
them, much less relate to or understand them. Many HPD sufferers are
characterized by making promises that they have no intention of keeping.
Sarah-Kate, for example, volunteered at a parent-teacher evening in
front of a large audience to put on a play based on multiculturalism.
It never materialized. Because she only had one group of students each
year before passing them on, she was able to get away with this behavior
for some years, but it did not go unnoticed by the principal.

People with HPD often move from job to job and relationship to relationship,
before finally succumbing to depression.

We will look at further characteristics of this personality disorder
in coming articles.